For a period in the late 90’s early 00’s, FutureMusic ran a series of covers spicing things up in an incredibly tacky way with cover models holding the synth reviewed that month.

What was the point of this? It’s tacky and sexist. The only thing sexy about a woman with a synthesizer is if she knows how to USE it, and I have a strong inclination that this wasn’t the case here.

Anyhow, these mags recently came up on MatrixSynth, and it seems that not many people still have them, so I dug through my collection and scanned the ones I have. I believe there are others I do not own that were released after my FM collection ends.

As I said, I personally find them tacky and sexist, but I guess I’ll let you decide. Click the image below to go to the full flickr set.

Future Music is the Daily Mail of music tech mags. It was and is a fucking rag, pitched entirely at clueless wannabes. I used to buy it back before the Internet was the center of synth-related content it is now, and stopped when I realized that those cover CDs were always shit — crap sample sets, lame tracks, crippled software.

Putting girls on the cover was probably the least stupid thing they did, and I say that while fully agreeing with you.

The last straw for me was when the editor panned Carl Craig’s Landcruising. That’s when I knew for sure they were a bunch of idiots.

I think that issue with the Korg Electribes was the last one I ever bought. 10 years ago, amazing.

Like Kent, I bought it regularly, before the internet got really big, back when I’d buy any copy of any music tech magazine ever. I can’t remember the last time I even looked at a copy. The only positive thing I can think of abt the magazine is that many many years ago, it introduced me to an act called Eleven Shadows, who are (were?) awesome.

While I completely agree with you about the covers being tacky & sexist (plenty of music tech ads over the years in many zineshave been just as bad as well) I’ll hang my head in shame a little and admit that I do kinda like the MC307 girl.